The updated Miami Vice movie is dark, detailed and only really gets going when the gunplay starts

There are some very pretty images in Miami Vice: a sporty little airplane flirting with a massive bank of clouds; down angles on speedboats cutting wide, frothy wakes through the water; almost any moment the camera concentrates on Gong Li or Naomie Harris.

But on the whole, the director, Michael Mann (who also wrote the screenplay), is in a grittier mood than he was in the days when Vice was a sensational TV presence. And he does not have a taste here for the muted tones that made Collateral so seductive in 2004. He's more in the dark-of-night Heat mode. He uses high-definition...